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1. I highly suspect a pretrained-only model could not do this, yes.

2. Most problems anyone has are solved problems or variations on solved problems. This type of distillation is extremely useful.

All knowledge is distilled from prior knowledge. I don’t think it matters what the author thinks or doesn’t think. The world is different than the one you knew now.

One thing is when you "distill" a working compiler from a language spec and books about compilers, another thing is when you e.g. copy chunks of GCC source code. That's definitely different, no?

Many "super-duper impressive" examples of LLM use end up being copyright laundering. Maybe the world is different now and copyright laundering is acceptable, but let's not pretend it's that cool and exciting.

I disagree, it’s incredibly impressive that this task can be automated. I think your hang up is really about not liking AI, which is totally fine. But this is still a very impressive application of the technology regardless

I recognize many applications of gen AI, but copyright laundering seems the least interesting for me.

Naturally libraries (models) have to come from somewhere.